Well, don’t you know? Democrats are hypocrits. After all the crap this Board has given certain Republican hypocrits (Sanford, anyone?), it’s not a surprise to hear someone make the point that hypocrisy isn’t a Republican-only policy.
Instead of making this about me, or hijacking the thread with a discussion of Harper, why don’t you go start a thread about it, and we can debate it there?
I don’t think you’re coming at this from the right perspective here. The idea isn’t to say “Gee, don’t you wish you would have voted for the other guy, now?”. The idea is to provide public criticism, to hold our elected officials accountable for their actions, and to let our disagreement with those officials be heard, weather we voted for them or not. Campaign promises don’t even matter, either. Do you agree with the actions of government as they occurred or are occurring now? If not, speak up.
Every single politician needs to be criticized, unless you think they are doing every single thing right. It doesn’t matter if their opponent in the last election was a horned, hoofed disciple of Hitler who ate roasted babies everyday for breakfast.
Oh, I guess they can sleep the sleep of the untroubled, safe in the knowledge that they saved the Republic from the horror that is John McCain. So I guess what Barack Obama does now is completely irrelevant to them. People like that should probably mosey along and find another thread that is more interesting to them. There are several Sarah Palin bash-a-thons which should be much more entertaining for those sorts of people.
There’s no need to bring Cheney into this.
Fine. I still don’t care, and never DID care about “transparency.” Wake me when Obama’s doing something that’s actually going to hurt anybody.
I thought closing Guantanamo and ending warrantless wiretapping was a matter of ‘fierce moral urgency’ for the left. Is that not the case any more?
For the second month in a row, casualties in Afghanistan are higher than in Iraq. If the trend continues, Afghanistan will soon be matching the Iraq war in the overall casualty rate. In a total of six years, the U.S. lost 4,316 soldiers in Iraq. So far, the U.S. has lost 667 in Aghanistan, but the rate is now up to 50 casualties per month. At that rate, if the conflict lasts as long as Iraq did, the total number of casualties will be almost the same.
Unlike the Iraq war, no one has the foggiest notion how to win in Afghanistan, or even what strategy to take to attempt to win. And unlike the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war is starting to destabilize U.S. relations with Pakistan. If you recall, these were exactly the reasons why George Bush decided to take on Iraq - there was no good strategy to ‘win’ in Afghanistan. Obama said that Afghanistan was the real battlefield, and if elected he would accelerate the war there.
So I guess we finally found one promise he kept.
Eh, that’s one step in it being turned into law, and the basics of a cap-and-trade law were debated for years beforehand (and were supported by both Presidential Candidates during the election, though I believe McCain has since changed his mind). Do you think it will become law before next year? If not there’s still plenty of time to debate and make changes. Complaining that every step in the legislative process isn’t proceeded by multiple months of debate is silly.
He’s done all these, I believe. Indeed, the stimulus was the largest tax cut in history, if memory serves.
I doubt he said he’d do this in his first year, at least not once it became obvious that the economy would be in the dumps and the stimulus would be necessary.
No doubt he broke his promise on the Sunshine Law, and that he shouldn’t have done so, but frankly, I don’t think many people care. Ditto for ex-lobiests.
I’d say Obama is certainly a centrist, and a fiscal conservative in that he believes cutting the deficit is important. But he also believes in deficit spending during times of severe economic recession. Again, he talked about the stimulus before he was elected, so treating it like a huge surprise is silly.
Eh, every candidate for basically any office since I’ve become politically aware has run on cutting waste, and the eventual savings always turn up to be minuscule. It’s the political version of offering a free lunch, “we don’t need to raise taxes or cut spending, we’ll just find a jillion dollars of waste in the budget”. It’s a blatantly silly claim, but every politician does it, Obama is apparently not different. He apparently tried his best and found, surprise-surprise, the federal gov’t is not actually throwing billions of dollars into furnaces or paper-shreders.
Assuming by 800$ billion “pork spending” you mean the stimulus (which doesn’t really fit the definition of "pork spending, which is spending attached by congress members to bills for pet projects back in their district, 300$ billion of the stimulus ‘spending’ was tax cuts, most of the rest was for general State and Federal programs, not targeted projects), Paygo doesn’t really apply. Paygo legislation applies to new structural spending, not one-time expenditures like the stimulus.
Afghanistan is where the bad guys actually are, and where we should have been all along. It’s stupid to compare it to Iraq, which had no purpose at all except to steal oil.
Do I detect a note of sarcasm? Canadian sarcasm can be very subtle, so its hard to be sure, but I definitely get a sense that you are not quite sincere in your congratulations.
What, perzackly, is your point, here? Is this simply another in the unending series of “lefty hypocrisy” Jeremiads? Or are you about total transparency? Would this conversion to total transparency be a recent development?
Or are we to be, again, stuck with political relativism? That we seek to progress from abject lying hounds to something rather better? I didn’t think I was voting for an avatar of political perfection, only that I was voting for an improvement. Granted, an improvement over eight years of a turd-infested fever swamp does not require all that much. McCain might have been an improvement, could hardly help it.
But he showed me who he was by picking Sarah Palin to be a heartbeat away from…oops, sorry, can’t complete the sentence, mind boggled.
And if its not about hypocrisy, well, what is it about? A politician does not live up to the letter of his promises? Am I to clutch my pearls and faint dead away?
What do you want him to be transparent about? Everything? Does that mean we get to finally find out what went on in Cheney’s office? Or would you prefer we just let bygones be bygones, sleeping dogs lie, that sort of thing? Are you of the opinion that total transparency is a positive good in all situations? Were you always of this opinion, or is this a new development?
I’m guessing if Obama put the stupid bills on the internet and went all the way through with opening up Gimo, Sam would LOVE the guy, right
Also, according to wikipedia, the bill took more then a month to pass after it was first introduced.
Eh?
This makes sense to you? If you can’t defeat the enemy you are fighting the proper response is to go fight someone you can beat?
And exactly what was our exit strategy in Iraq?
As to the OP I certainly am not pleased that Obama is slow/back tracking on certain promises. Certainly I do not think there has been a president ever who was able to deliver on all their campaign promises. Nevertheless I think they should be held accountable for them. Sometimes they may have tried to deliver but the reality was such that they couldn’t. Other times they just conveniently forget about their promises.
Something like the Sunshine dealie is egregious to me. Particularly since I think it was such a simple thing to do. I am willing to bet there is an intern somewhere in the government who can scan a document and post it to their web site. Is it a big deal they are not doing this in the grand scheme of things? No. But one has to wonder why they wouldn’t do this.
Transparency in our government is critical. We should be screaming for it at every turn. Of course those in government (on any side of the aisle) despise transparency. Much better to do things in secret so if it goes bad you can pretend you had nothing to do with it.
I do find it more than a little hypocritical that the Bush defenders are now screaming about this. Bush accrued tons of power to the Executive. Is it any surprise that the next guy, no matter who it is, chooses to hang on to that power? I find it odd that people who were so happy to hand unrestrained power to “their guy” forgot that it will come to bite them in the ass down the road when “their guy” is no longer in power. You reap what you sow.
So, FTR I am not happy Obama is not cleaning up as much as I hoped (although I think I was semi-rational in knowing that only so much could be done and was likely no matter what to fall short of my expectations). I wanted to see him try though.
I think we all forget that at the end of the day, Republican or Democrat or Other, they are all politicians and all play the same bullshit games.
Piling on with the OMB budget deadline is bullshit, and it weakens whatever youe argument might have been. I agree with you that we have to move faster to end endless detention, return to pre-Bush FISA standards and investigate Bush era torture and other wrongdoing (you are with me on those matters, I presume?)
But the first OMB report under Bush and under Clinton were delayed further than this.
They also can’t do very much by themselves. It’s not a dictatorship.
Actually, no, I don’t recall any such thing. And I very much doubt anybody else does, either. Which is to say, what in the HELL are you talking about?
I find these shotgun-style threads very frustrating. Some of the over ten claims in the OP are accurate, others are not (indeed, some of them have been debunked in other threads on this very board). Some of them are disappointing, others are not. Unless I’m expected to type a 3,000 word post that no one will read because it’s too long, it is going to be impossible to discuss each claim on its merits. If you’d like to choose one, I’d be happy to discuss whether it is true, and whether if it is true, I am disappointed.
A good point, they are much more like lemmings.
The only reason it’s been delayed is because Obama failed to ram it through. His falling approval ratings are scaring the moderates in the Senate, and Obama is losing traction with him. So it may get a proper debate in spite of what Obama is trying to do.
Yeah, who could argue against passing a gigantic 800 billion dollar spending package that no one had read?
The first tax he implemented was an excise tax on cigarettes, which hit poor people the hardest. The cap and trade bill will be a huge tax on small business. The health care bill has an 8% payroll tax aimed squarely at small business. Obama is talking about eliminating the Social Security cap, which will impact people who make significantly less than $250,000. No one believes that health care can be paid for on the backs of the rich alone.
He said he’d do it at all times, that it would be the modus operandi of his government.
Really? So that’s the guideline now? Nobody cares? They sure cared about lobbyists when the Bush administration was in power. Funny how things change.
Which is why his budget includes ten years of increasing deficits? At what point is belief supposed to translate into action? He has signed off on every piece of garbage spending proposal that’s been put in front of him.
Um, then why did he sign off on a ‘stimulus’ package that spends almost no money while the economy is actually in recession? By his projections, the economy was supposed to grow at 3.2% next year, and yet he signed off on a package that would have only spent 11% of the 800 billion dollars by then. On what planet does this translate into an effective stimulus package, as opposed to just being a laundry list of big government spending plans?
The stimulus he talked about was very different than the one that was implemented.
Oh, sorry. I thought he was the candidate running on ‘change’. Must have been someone else.
‘Pork’ is simply wasteful government spending. Earmarks are just one form of pork. The ‘stimulus’ wasn’t designed to stimulate the economy, it was designed to set up a host of new infrastructure projects that would have to be paid for forever (i.e. all the new schools being built), and it was timed so that the maximum spending would go out just before the midterm elections, not when the economy actually needed it.
Actually, come to think on it, Shodan brings up a salient point, however inadvertently. A lot of these diatribes are aimed at “Obama cultists”, that deranged segment of the body politic that sees Obama as an avatar of political perfection. We are offered examples of weakness and hypocrisy as if we were to be shocked into horror and dismay.
I am tickled pink that Bush is no longer infesting the Oval Orifice. This is a good thing. But Obama is just a man: a better man, but still…
I never thought he cured lepers, or walked on water. However, if he did walk on water, I would not be offering that as proof that he can’t swim.